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Thursday, November 4, 2010

Cutifying your outfit/ The headband tutorial...

Anyone who knows me is fully aware of my headband obsession. I have headbands in every shape and size, and every color of the rainbow. Though I do find them incredibly adorable, I must admit my real reason for wearing them is to tame my afro mess of a head of curly hair or to hide the rapidly forming greasy roots. To be honest about 5 of the 7 days of the week my hair is in a pony tail (sorry hubs!) and the majority of those days I will also be wearing a head band. I guess it helps to "style up" the outfit a little bit and helps me feel not so guilty about NEVER doing my hair.

For this past weekend's festivities, I decided to create a little red floral number to cheer on my bull dogs and show some team spirit. I couldn't decide what I wanted, so I did what any girl would do, I made two so I could have options. I love having options.

The Rose Headband:

Materials:

3, 1 X 12 inch pieces of felt fabric

hot glue gun

head band of your choosing

Steps:

1. Cut your fabric. You will need 3 strips of felt that are approximately 1 inch wide and 12 inches long.

you need 3 of these

2. Fold your fabric in half and roll up the end a few rolls to start your rosette.

3. Begin rolling the fabric around the center, twisting/flipping the fabric towards the center on every turn. You will have to smooth the "tail" of the fabric after you twist.

4. When you come to the end of your fabric, simply flip your rosette over and hot glue the remaining fabric to the back. You then may need to tack down some of the "petals" to make sure they don't separate.

5. Repeat 3 times for a total of 3 rosettes. Don't they really look like roses?

6. Hot glue to the head band of your choice and Voila...a rose inspired head band!

Are you on headband overload yet? I love how it turned out, and it really is super easy!!

Here comes tutorial number two! How did you get so lucky to have two in 1 post??

1. Trace circles of 3 different sizes onto your felt and cut them out. I used a spool of thread for the smallest size, a bottle of craft paint for the medium size, and then simply guessed about 1 centimeter larger than the craft paint bottle to form the largest size. They DO NOT need to be perfect at all.

2. Take your lighter and burn the edges slightly of each "petal" circle to give it a little bit of an antique feel. To me they look too crafty without the edges burned. It's hard to tell with the grey fabric, but makes a HUGE difference with the lighter fabrics (see the red one at the end of this post).

Left: not burned/ Right: burned

3. Stack your petals up biggest to littlest on top and sew them together with 2-3 stitches.

4. Sew 1 or more bead(s) into the center to create the middle of the flower.

**Note, use the same color thread as your beads so it will not be seen. I made this mistake with my first headband**

5. Here's where I differed a little bit from the original tutorial. I wanted my flowers to be removable in case I ever wanted to wear the head band plain again. Also, I can't wear those stretchy head bands for some reason. Is my head funny shaped? Wait. Don't answer that. So, I decided on a regular thin head band. I cut a strip of felt and glued it to the back of the flowers.

6. Then I cut a regular rubber band into about 1 inch pieces. You could definitely use the baby rubber bands (the clear ones) for this, but I didn't have any.

7. Tie each rubber band into a double knot around a pencil. It's important to still have a "loop" at the bottom.

8.Then hot glue your rubber band "loop", knot side down, to each end of your fabric strip on the back of the flowers.

9. Now just slide your headband in through the rubber bands, and Ta Da, a removable flower headband!!

Here's the one I made for Saturday...

You can really see the burnt edges on this one. Makes a HUGE difference!